War Tax Resisters in Eugene, Oregon

An article by Ann Baker
from the 13 March 1972Eugene Register-Guard
gives a peek at how the war tax resistance movement in Eugene, Oregon looked
then. The Peace Investors of Eugene group no longer exists, I don’t think,
though there is still a thriving war tax resistance group in Eugene.

Anti-war group urges tax resistance

If you happen to walk by the state employment office in Eugene around
10 Wednesday morning, don’t be
surprised if someone hands you a tiny sliver of pumpkin pie and says, “We
wish this was bigger but the military gets the rest.”

The pie is a symbol for two things — a new Eugene antiwar group called
PIE (Peace
Investors of Eugene) and an often-used pie-shaped illustration of the federal
spending budget.

Members of PIE
group think too much of the federal “pie” goes for defense spending. They
would like to see people reduce the amount of money available for that
purpose by refusing to pay the 10 per cent federal excise tax on their
telephone bills and by reducing their federal income tax liability.

The group hopes to collect the money people save through these two methods
and donate it to local organizations such as free schools; medical services;
legal defense funds; cooperatives; peace, resistance and liberation groups;
employment centers for “peace jobs” and child care centers.

When members of the group hand out the pieces of pie in front of the
employment office Wednesday, they will
also set up large “pie charts” purportedly to show the portion of the federal
budget which goes for military spending in relation to the amount allocated
for other purposes.

According to Justine Heavilon, one of the organizers of
PIE,
the group selected the state employment office as the site for its kick-off
event because “we wanted to target one of the population groups that needs
the kinds of services the federal government should be providing — the
unemployed.”

Mrs. Heavilon said the members are primarily people who have refused to pay
their federal telephone taxes for a number of years. She estimates the
current membership at about 40.

In addition to collecting and allocating money, the group plans to provide
tax consultations to tell people how they can legally reduce the amount of
federal income tax they have to pay. The group sponsored a clinic for this
purpose March 4 and has scheduled another
clinic for 2
p.m., March 18 at Harris Hall adjacent
to the Lane County Courthouse.

According to Bates, the people who refuse to pay the phone tax attach a note
to their phone bills explaining the reason for the refusal.

When a person refuses to pay the phone tax, Mrs. Heavilon said, the phone
company turns the unpaid bill over to the Internal Revenue Service. The
IRS
sends several notices over a period of months, then contacts the person and
asks if he would like to pay the tax plus six per cent interest, she said.

“Many people pay at that point,” Mrs. Heavilon said. “If you refuse to pay
then, they ask if you have a bank account, if you own a house or car, and if
you have a job. The procedure usually used then is to take the amount (of the
unpaid tax plus interest) from your bank account.”

Richard Armony, information officer for the Portland
IRS
district — which includes Eugene — confirmed that this is the procedure
used in all tax delinquency cases. Armony said that, in addition to the six
per cent interest charged for delinquent payments, there is a “failure-to-pay
penalty” charged which is also six per cent of the unpaid tax amount.

Armony also said that he doesn’t know how many people in Oregon have refused
to pay the phone tax because tax delinquency cases of all types are lumped
into one category.

Members of the
PIE group
extimate there are about 100 people in the Eugene area who have consistently
refused to pay the phone tax.

The PIE
group’s headquarters are in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Gray, 1059
Hilyard St., Eugene.

“To force me to pay this outrageous demand you must either confiscate my
business or put me in prison,”
Mrs. Mary D. Cain,
editor and owner of the weekly Summit Sun, wrote
Snyder, “I hope you choose the latter course.”

“This is a test case in the matter of paying this thing,” she said. “Pop your
whip, Mr. Snyder. I am ready.”

Last year the government attached the bank accounts of a number of Texas
housewives who refused to pay social security on their domestic help.

Mrs. Cain announced today that she had
closed her bank account, farmed out the task of printing her paper, and
released her husband from any obligation to pay either her own or the
newspaper’s debts.

Mrs. Cain’s 1,500 word letter to Snyder sounded a great deal like a playback
of the anti-New-Deal-Fair-Deal platform on which she stumped Mississippi last
summer as the state’s first woman candidate for governor.

Lately she has been mentioned as a possible candidate for congress or the
U.S. senate this
year. She has denied both reports.

Although she lost a battle that went to the Supreme Court [over her Social Security tax
resistance], the Government eventually dropped the case. The Social Security
program, she said, was “unconstitutional, immoral and un-American.”

Two revenue agents secured her weekly newspaper office in Summit with a
padlocked chain. Mrs. Cain sawed off the lock and chain and mailed them to
the Internal Revenue Department with a defiant note.

To frustrate the collectors she assigned her weekly paper,
Summit Sun to her niece, Mary Lou Butler, 20 years
old, but retained the authority of editor and manager, without pay.…

The government set a marshall to padlock the Summit
Sun…

Mrs. Cain sawed off the padlock and mailed it to the marshal. She repeated
the job for the benefit of newspaper, newsreel and television cameras. She
made her crime as flagrant as she could. She gloried and gloated. The
violence against the court’s padlock probably also made her guilty of
deliberate, defiant contempt of the federal district court, but still the
Department of Justice, like the Treasury, looked the other way.…

…She has received more than 7,000 letters and unsolicited donations of
$700 for her legal expanese.…

Group Plans Tax Strike

Pacifists Balk At Helping Pay For U.S. Defense

New York — (AP) —
A pacifist Presbyterian minister said
yesterday 150 members of a peace-seeking
group had decided they would not pay any Federal income taxes to be used for
financing “war preparations.”

The Rev. A.J. Muste,
national secretary of the Peacemaker said yesterday he himself was one of
“about 15” members of the organization in the New York City area who have
launched the tax resistance movement.

Muste described the Peacemakers as a “non-violent revolutionary pacifist
group engaged in a campaign similar to that of the late Mahatma Gandhi in
India.” The organization has about 2,000 members, he said.

The 150 persons throughout the country who have joined in the tax resistance
movement, Muste said, have either decided “to withhold all their taxes or
just that part of them which proportionately would go to war preparations.”

Muste predicted general resistance to war preparedness in the form of
refusals to register for draft and the tax resistance movement would increase.

He said the Peacemakers organization is “completely non-political, opposed to
totalitarianism in any form, including communism.”

Muste also is national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation which he
described as a religious organization numbering some 15,000 and dedicated to
peace.

Meanwhile, in Yellow Springs,
O., a 75-year-old Quaker
widow deducted 32.2 per cent from the first installment of her income tax
because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime
against humanity.”

Mrs. Caroline Urie failed last year in a similar
protest. She deducted 34.6 per cent of her estimated tax for the year, but,
after taxes in her bracket were reduced, she had still paid more than was
called for and at the year’s end the government owed her money.

She said yesterday she had made sure the same things wouldn’t happen
this year. She said she would withhold the full
amount of military taxes by paying only the first installment of the tax now
and giving herself until
Jan. 15, 1950,
to pay the final quarter.

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